Engineering Manager, Research

Speedrun Talent Network; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 280,000 - 430,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

Life Insurance

Disability Benefits

401K / Pension

Parental Leave

Fertility and family benefits

Wellness stipend

Daily lunches

Vacation policy, flexible

Job summary

Decagon is seeking a manager to lead and grow a research team focused on model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior. You will own the technical roadmap, drive ambitious ideas to reliable production impact, and mentor engineers while maintaining high quality standards.

You'll partner with Infrastructure, Platform, Product, and customer-facing teams to translate research into scalable, real-world solutions for enterprise AI agents.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience building machine-learning systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure.
• 1+ years of people management experience, with a strong individual-contributor background.
• Deep experience post-training, evaluating, deploying, or serving foundation models at scale.
• Strong technical judgment and a track record of translating ambiguous research ideas into measurable product outcomes.
• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing technical talent, with clear communication across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team of research engineers through hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development.
• Own the technical direction and roadmap for your area, prioritizing the highest-leverage investments across models, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent systems.
• Turn open-ended research directions into focused programs with clear hypotheses, milestones, decisions, and measures of production impact.
• Stay close to the technical work through architecture and experiment reviews, debugging, and individual contribution.
• Set a high bar for experimental rigor, reproducibility, evaluation quality, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts.
• Partner across Infrastructure, Agent Platform, Product Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to move research into production.

Skills

ML systems

Language models

Post-training evaluation

Job description

About Decagon

Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences.

Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block's Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel.

We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others.

We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values - Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner's Mindset, and The Polymath Principle - shape how we work and grow as a team.

About the Team

Read more about the research team's work here: https://decagon.ai/blog/introducing-decagon-labs

The Research team develops the model and decision-making stack that powers Decagon's conversational agents for enterprise support. We research, adapt, and implement state-of-the-art techniques in model training, prompting, orchestration, and evaluation in order to make our agents more accurate, robust, and efficient in real-world deployments.

Our goal is to push the frontier of applied conversational AI: agents that reliably understand nuanced intent, track long context, and take the right actions under uncertainty. We measure success the way customers feel it: higher resolution rates, better user satisfaction, and consistent behavior at scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for a manager to lead and grow a team within Decagon Research. You'll own the team and technical roadmap for an area spanning model post-training, evaluation, safety, speech, or agent behavior, driving ambitious ideas from research to reliable production impact.

Managers here operate with high ownership and technical depth while helping their teams move quickly and maintain a high quality bar. You'll create clarity in ambiguous research areas, develop exceptional engineers, and align the team’s work with the product outcomes that matter most to customers.

In this role, you will

• Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team of research engineers through hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development
• Own the technical direction and roadmap for your area, prioritizing the highest-leverage investments across models, evaluation, safety, speech, and agent systems
• Turn open-ended research directions into focused programs with clear hypotheses, milestones, decisions, and measures of production impact
• Stay close to the technical work through architecture and experiment reviews, debugging, and individual contribution
• Set a high bar for experimental rigor, reproducibility, evaluation quality, engineering execution, and safe model rollouts
• Partner across Infrastructure, Agent Platform, Product Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams to move research into production

Your background looks something like this

• 5+ years of industry experience building machine-learning systems involving language models, speech, agents, or model infrastructure
• 1+ years of people management experience, with a strong individual-contributor background
• Deep experience post-training, evaluating, deploying, or serving foundation models at scale
• Strong technical judgment and a track record of translating ambiguous research ideas into measurable product outcomes
• Experience hiring, coaching, and developing technical talent, with clear communication across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders

Even better if you have

• A record of influential research, open-source contributions, or production ML systems with significant real-world impact

Compensation

$280K - $430K + Offers Equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and the scope of responsibilities, with flexibility for candidates who demonstrate exceptional impact.

In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States.

Benefits

We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
• Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
• Parental Leave
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
• Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance
• Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best
• Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)

These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon's policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.